Jonathan Leal is a Latino author, composer, and scholar based in Los Angeles. Originally from the Rio Grande Valley, the South Texas region located at the border of the United States and Mexico, Leal creates writing, music, and integrative arts projects that amplify creative resistances to bordered life. He is the author of Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop, co-editor of Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision, and co-creator of numerous musical projects, including, most recently After Now with producer Brandon Guerra and former Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Southern California, as well as a member of the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle.